How to match a remittance advice to your invoices

When a customer pays several invoices at once, the money arrives as one lump sum and the detail arrives separately: a remittance advice, usually a PDF, listing which invoices the payment covers. Aged care providers, NDIS plan managers and larger companies all pay this way.

Reconciling it by hand means reading down the PDF and finding each invoice number in your records to mark it paid. On a long remittance that is slow, and it is exactly the kind of work where one invoice gets missed — then chased for months after it was paid. This guide covers doing it by dropping the PDF in instead.

What you need for it to work

• Invoice numbers made of letters followed by digits. Calendar Force numbers invoices from the client's group code, like FNCAU001, so invoices it generated already qualify.
• A remittance that quotes your invoice numbers. Matching is on your invoice number. If a payer's remittance lists only their own reference numbers there is nothing to match on — see the third check below.
• A PDF with real text in it. Remittances produced by accounting or payment systems almost always are. A scanned or photographed page is only an image, and it is refused with a message saying so, rather than quietly matching nothing.

Step 1: Open Match Remittance

In the web app, open the Services tab and go to Remittances. Open Match Remittance.

Step 2: Drop in the PDF

Drag the remittance PDF onto the upload area, or click to browse for it. It is read and matched in one step.

What happens to it

Every invoice-number-shaped piece of text is pulled out of the PDF and compared with the Invoice Number column of all four logs — Service Log, Private Jobs Log, Company Log and NDIS Log — so a remittance covering several kinds of work reconciles in a single pass.

Matching is exact. FNCAU001 on the remittance matches invoice FNCAU001 and nothing else — not FNCAU0012, and not an amount or an ABN that happens to share some digits. That strictness is the point: a loose match that marks the wrong invoice paid is worse than no match, because nobody goes back to check a paid invoice.

Each matched invoice that is not already paid has its Date Paid filled in, and the row shows as paid in the log. Invoices already marked paid are listed but left as they are.

Reading the results

The first list is every invoice that matched, with its log, client and amount, and whether it was newly marked paid or was already paid.

The second is every invoice-shaped number on the remittance that is not in any of your logs. Usually that is one of four things: a typo on the payer's side, an invoice raised outside Calendar Force, a line that belongs to another business, or a reference code on the slip that simply looks like an invoice number. It is shown in full so you can see exactly what was read, and chase what needs chasing.

Three things to check before you trust it

1. Amounts are not compared. A matched invoice is marked paid whatever amount the remittance shows against it. If a payer short-pays, or pays one line in part, the invoice is still marked paid — so run your eye down the amounts in the results against the slip.
2. Date Paid is the day you run it, not the payment date printed on the remittance. Run it when the remittance arrives and the two will be close.
3. Some remittances do not quote your invoice numbers. Some funders issue an RCTI — a recipient-created tax invoice — that references their own service numbers instead. Those take a different route in the same Remittances panel: SI Remittance Extraction reads the service numbers off the PDF, and SI Lookup matches them to the jobs you have recorded them against.

Chasing the ones that did not arrive

Once the paid invoices are marked, whatever is still overdue is what genuinely needs chasing. Follow Up Overdue, also in the Remittances panel, gathers overdue invoices in one place and emails each client a payment reminder with the invoice re-attached. You can edit the message before it goes, and it does not use invoice tokens.

What it costs

Matching a remittance does not use invoice tokens or SMS credits.

What this does not do

This marks invoices paid in your Calendar Force logs. It does not connect to your bank or accounting software, read bank feeds, or record part-payments. If you also keep books in accounting software, the payment still needs recording there.

Summary

1. Make sure your invoice numbers are letters followed by digits, and the payer quotes them.
2. Services → Remittances → Match Remittance, and drop in the PDF.
3. Matched, unpaid invoices get today's date as Date Paid.
4. Check the amounts against the slip, and look into anything that did not match.
5. Chase what is left with Follow Up Overdue.

Calendar Force is a Google Workspace Marketplace add-on plus a web app. The invoices being matched here are generated from your Google Calendar, including NDIS invoices. See pricing or start with 20 free invoice tokens.